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An Uncertain and Difficult Road Ahead in London

LONDON — The Liberal Democrats hoped it would happen. The Conservatives warned that it could lead to disaster. And the Labour Party could potentially use it to cling to power for a little while longer.

On Friday, Britain faced a hung Parliament for the first time since the 1970s, a situation in which no party has an overall majority and so cannot pass legislation without support from another party. It is unclear how this relatively unusual situation will play out here, but there are a number of possibilities.

First, the Conservatives, who won the most seats, could try to form a coalition with one or more smaller parties. The leading contender for that role would be the Liberal Democrats, lagging a distant third, who would relish the chance to play kingmaker but have been coy about how they would go about it.

Alternatively, the Tories could seek to make deals with individual members of all the small parties in Parliament — the Ulster Unionists, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and others. Some of those parties are traditional ideological opponents of the Tories, and it is unclear at this point whether all the small-party votes combined would even be enough to allow the Conservatives to reach the 326 seats needed to form a majority.

On Friday, barring a late swing, with results declared from almost 620 of the 650 constituencies, it seemed mathematically unlikely that Labour and the Liberal Democrats would win enough seats between them to form a majority coalition. But they could try to join to form a minority-party coalition government.

That is what happened in 1976, with disastrous results, when James Callaghan became prime minister in a minority Labour government after his predecessor, Harold Wilson, resigned. Labour was forced to deal with members of various tiny parties, who used their unexpected clout to hold up legislation and make difficult demands. Mired in economic crises, the government eventually had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

The leading wild card in all this is the Liberal Democratic Party. During an unexpected, and short-lived, surge in public opinion polls during the campaign, the Liberal Democratic leader, Nick Clegg, intimated that he would be reluctant to enter into a formal deal with another party but that he would consider legislation on a case-by-case basis.

He has also said that the party that wins the most seats and the most votes is entitled to his party’s “support,” though he has not said what he means by that. But his own electoral performance fell far short of most projections before Thursday’s election, narrowing his options.

Many elements of Mr. Clegg’s legislative program, which includes scrapping college tuition and overhauling the parliamentary election system, are anathema to the other parties, and it is unclear what kind of demands Mr. Clegg would feel he could make.

An interesting twist, British constitutional experts say, is that Gordon Brown, as the sitting prime minister, has the right to remain in office until another party can prove that it has the confidence of Parliament — that is, that it can amass enough votes to pass legislation.

Such an effort can prove risky and embarrassing, as the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath found in the general election of 1974, which also resulted in a hung Parliament. In that case, the Conservative government lost the election to the Labour opposition, but tried to remain in government by negotiating a deal with the Liberal Party.

But the effort failed, and Mr. Heath was forced to resign just four days later, paving the way for Mr. Wilson and his ill-fated minority Labour government to take over.

Many European countries are smoothly run by coalitions made up of different parties, but the British system does not comfortably accommodate coalitions.

Its legislative chamber is physically set up so that the governing party sits on one side and the opposition on the other. And even if the parliamentary parties are inclined to make deals, the leaders might have a hard time persuading grass-roots members to follow.

For a final element of unpredictability, because the sitting prime minister has the right to call an election whenever he or she wants, it is impossible to plan for long-term cooperation on any sort of legislative agenda, an unhappy prospect for the junior partner in the coalition.